A New Language

I made it back from Mexico, getting home about midnight last night. Long day of traveling. Leaving Merida, Yucatan at almost 90°F and extremely humid arriving at Indianapolis to 27°F with a little snow is always an interesting experience. One that requires a change of clothes along the way.

During my trip this time I realized I really need to know more Spanish. I pick up a lot interacting with people while in Mexico, but I need more. There is a service provided free of charge for learning new languages called Duolingo.

Duolingo offers free education in 33 different languages including a couple of fictional languages, Klingon (from Star Trek) and High Valyrian (from Game of Thrones). From the website, Spanish is the most popular language being learned with 21.2 million active learners. It's surprising to me that 589,000 people are trying to learn High Valyrian and 390,000 are trying to learn Klingon.

Duolingo teaches you to read, write and speak your new language through repetition as you work through sections or chapters. Each chapter introduces new words associated with each other. The association may center on a meal at a restaurant or a trip shopping. The chapter is divided into four levels and each level may have as many as 200 opportunities to either translate a phrase or speak a phrase. So there is a lot of repetition within each chapter.

As you progress, subsequent chapters build on some of the words you learned in previous chapters and work to refresh your knowledge of the material you have already learned. The first five or six chapters encompassed most of the Spanish I already know, but I did know about 90% of the material within those chapters.

By my next trip down, I hope to surprise my friends there by knowing more Spanish. My goal is to be able to participate more in conversations in Spanish without having some of them translate for me.